Palimpsest

Oh, God, November thought. Of course it's easy there, of course all those people, from all those places, they have to speak to each other, somehow, it's managed there, but here…

“Ludovico,” she said slowly, sure it wouldn't help, “You said Caracalla. Caracalla. Just tell me when. Just say a day Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday Thursday, Friday Saturday Sunday Say one.”

There was a long pause, and November thought she could feel him struggle to push himself through the telephone line as she did, under the Atlantic, with all the bony, luminous deep-water fish.

Finally, his tortured voice escaped into the ether: “Domenica. Domenica. Sunday. Mezzogiorno. Mi dispiace. I am sorry. Sunday. Caracalla.”

A plane, in the end, was as easy as a raft. November wore a green dress, though she could not decide if she meant it as a gesture aimed at distant Casimira or the nearby Green Wind, bundled against the frozen cities past the clouds. She did not see the shanties of the Six Winds outside her little submarine-small window, no spires of cirrus sunsets or broad pavilions of blue ice, but she allowed herself, considering everything, to think that perhaps they really were there, invisible, bustling, raucous. Like bees, little winds, little breezes in a great pearly hive. After all, Weckweet had been there. Must have been there. Casimira knew the name. Her father had been right. He had pulled out a card from a catalogue and—chance beyond chance—he had been right. Everything in the world had its place. Even November.

She had opened the hives that morning, and the bees had not flown out, but stayed sleepily in their droning, buzzing palaces. They would go when they pleased, they were not hers. Her bees waited for her, and she flew toward them, as fast as she could.

Of course people stared at her. The stewardess was careful not to touch her, and she was questioned as to her communica-bility She had almost laughed at that, it seemed richly hilarious to her. But she was really and truly demoniac these days, her body scored with healing stings, her fingers gone, her face a swollen black mass. She kept the hood of her jacket up and smiled apologetically at the children who were jealously herded away from her. Don't worry, she wanted to say, it's not catching, not like that, anyway. But she remained silent.

Caracalla was a bathhouse. Or had been. A stately ruin, old brick and long grass now, crumbled arches, stairs fallen into walls and mushroomy hillocks. It was on the outskirts of Rome, a city November had never seen till now a city full of light that seemed palpable, that seemed flesh. Everything in Rome had taken on the color of that sunlight, everything was half-golden, one half or the other, a pervasive gold quietly conquering all, having learned lessons from the stones. Everything was so old, so old, torn down and rebuilt and renamed a dozen times. She had read on a tourist's plaque that the cold, courteous marble of St. Peter's Basilica was quarried from the old Forum, and it had made her inexplicably sad, that she had looked at the mammoth church the day before and known nothing of where it had come from, what it had been before. Cities built out of cities. All of them, built out of each other. Torn down, etched out, and built over again, without revealing a whisper of their old selves. Palimpsests. Manuscripts scratched away and rewritten, over and over. November smiled to herself, walking through the stony streets.

Sunday, as is its nature, was slow in coming, but it found her eventually, nosed her out with its beatific muzzle, and found her sitting in the seedy grass of Caracalla, waiting, her heart racing itself in circles around nothing. These walls once had pipes in them, steaming water gurgling up and down, she thought, and now they are so dry. In magnanimous retirement from the business of human purity But November liked the idea of sitting in a place that was once covered in water. It felt permanent, peaceful. She felt she could still be cleaned here, with the grass and the stone, that they could grind anything away from her and leave her whole.

Ludovico was long in coming, or at least she felt that he was. He came walking around a crumbled red wall, looking just as he had before, an intractable reader's bent posture, a shy man's gait. She felt as though she had met him a thousand times already, had felt that woman's mouth under his, had felt the paws and claws on him at the church, had heard the screams at the races. She wanted to hold her arms out to him. She ached to do it.

But Ludovico was staring. She had known he would stare. She did not look like this there, in her fine dress and her corona of bees. There, November was full of light. The venom of the bees glowed in her. Here she was just a woman in her thirties with a bad dye job and a green winter dress, her nails chewed, her fingers gone, her welts half-healed, leaving tracks across her body like premature wrinkles, like a burn victim. And her face, as though the city had struck her. She tried to smile under that stare, but she knew what she looked like, and though she had planned this so carefully, she did not think now that he would touch her.

“Hello,” he said. His accent was gnarled and barbed, and she knew in a moment he had practiced the word in a mirror all week.

He sat next to her, and the sun ringed his thin hair. He looked like a saint to her, with that golden disc behind him, such a serious face, such gentle eyes and gaunt cheeks.

They said nothing. They could not, they had no tongue between them. The air between their mouths thickened and crackled, but neither had the blades to pierce it. They sat thus, beneath the towers of brick, the old, broken city, looking at each other and saying nothing, and November felt it was ridiculous, that she had come so far, and had nothing to offer but her wounds.

And then Ludovico ducked his head a little and sought her mouth, and finding it, would not let it go. He clasped her hand in his, the wounded one, the one Clara could not look at, and he kissed her with a wolfish need, groaning into her with such force she felt she had stolen his breath.

You felt it, she thought, when all these things were done to me. Is that why you do not care?

But he already had her tight around the waist, and tears wet both their faces, water again flowing in that dried-up place, and he called her name over and over, morphed strangely in his mouth, but her name nonetheless. He suckled at her breasts like a child, and she bit his shoulder lightly, catlike, whispering his name, too, the only words they knew. The only words in the world. He lifted her against the half-wall of the old caldarium, clumsily, for an intractable reader is not a strapping man, and she winced—she had not been ready, but she did not care, and he did not. It was a virgin's hurt; too much too soon, and she did not mind that. November tilted her face to the sky, and the sun washed her bare, washed her clean with its great old hands. His body leapt up into hers, pressing against her core as though it was the skin of a drum that he could break, and let loose such strange songs. She laughed again: there is a list of things necessary for happiness.

Ludovico cried out like a maddened sparrow when he came, as though he had broken, vanished, leaving such feathers in her, drifting slowly down to her bones.

AS ON THE BANKS OF MANY FAMOUS RIVERS, there is a small, dreary maritime museum on the Albumen, near where the shallows become swamps and those particular folk who own not grand ships but small, sweet boats never meant for fishing, but for flying dearly-bought scarlet sails and hoisting golden-skinned girls into the wind, store their treasured craft in the winter. In addition to the museums prodigious collection of prehistoric trivia and supplementary material, at least sixteen new varieties of dust were brought into being, catalogued, and annotated within its poor, sagging walls.

No traveling exhibits visit this place; the few glass cases and heavy iron frames have been here since before Oduvaldo, the current curator, began his tenure, and will be here when he passes the keys to his daughter Maud, who with her first giggling, gurgling words admonished her mother into silence. The long and distressing history of the white river is captured, boxed, and made small within this place, made to sit up and do tricks for the half-dozen or so visitors that it is proud to boast each year.

There is a photograph on the north wall-but how can it be a photograph? Yet it is, black and white, fade

d beyond any reasonable verisimilitude, and certainly someone spilled tea on it one hundred years ago, two hundred. Its frame is lead, hung with fishing weights in a previous curators attempt at festive decoration. It shows, as if from the air-but how can it? How can this angle ever have been possible in a world without airplanes, how can anyone have photographed this thing?-a broad, flattened circle on a vast, muddy plain full of twisted tamarisk trees and mammoth, antediluvian ferns. High, vicious mountains ring the savannah, and the sun is feeble between their peaks. The circle is enormous, and nothing grows within it. There are faint lines criss-crossing the circle-ah, but they must be creases, accordion folds, some crude soul must have mishandled this fragile thing! Your credulity can be stretched only so far! The lines are no more than spidery streaks where one sort of mud becomes another. But they remind you of something, of marked skin and maps. They spoke from the center of the plain like a wheel, and the center is a black space, like a hole dropping down through the earth and out again, and the tamarisks seem to lean in to peer at nothing at all.

The card beneath it, which was once handwritten, and is now neatly letter-pressed with inhabited initials and other unnecessary flourishes, reads:

The Plain of Palimpsest, Seen from a Great and Unknown Height.

There is no date. There could not possibly be a date. It is surely a fake, and not even a clever one, as photography is hardly an ancient art. Of the half-dozen annual visitors, at least four angrily accuse Oduvaldo of playing them for fools. He sits placidly in his great felt chair, crosses his mottled mule-legs, and smokes his churchwarden with satisfaction. He knows nothing of archeopho-tography and does not care to-the picture was in the museum when his grandfather was young, and that is enough for him.

In the glass cases various items rest on faded velvet-a primitive tattoo needle, coins of indeterminate age and vaguely Asiatic appearance, a street sign from some early local settlement, the word Thoa large and still clear, if faded nearly to the color of the wood. And there is a remarkable variety of anchors, one artifact that comes easily to the curdled lowlands of the Albumen. There is a large and colorful mural of the great naval battle of Kausia Shallows-Casimiras green galleons explode with oily abandon, showering the beached and wretched wooden frigates defending this very spot with a vicious rain of glistening spiders. It is garishly colored in a school of art long out of favor, but its very gaudiness lends it gravitas. There are three musket balls and five desiccated spiders, their innards smashed and molten, arranged in an elegant star-shape on a threadbare velvet pedestal below it.

Oduvaldo is content with his life. He served his time in the army, he feels justified in his contentment. Maud has labeled all her toys and the silverware as well with small, hand-printed placards, and he is confident in her inheritance. He has no secrets, save the bits of chocolate he smuggles into every drawer in the museum, so that after lunch, and coffee, and his churchwarden, he can slide a black square into his mouth, close his eyes, and let it melt on his tongue as the sun fades his artifacts with gentle, inexorable affection.

Oleg huddles under what he understands, but does not care to know, is the Kausia Bridge. Angry, leviathan cockerels sneer down at him as a diffident rain begins to take an interest. The old man had not liked the look of him, and when he touched one of the musket balls, the old beast had silently furiously, shoved him out of the door and into the first creamy puddles of the river. He wants to see that photograph again. He knuckles rain out of his eyes and squints at the current, at the towns across the water, at the lanterns on fishing boats still hoping for koi at this hour.

Miserable in one city, miserable in another. Oleg hunches against the gracefully arching underside of the bridge and turns up his collar He has seen movies with men like him in them, turning up their collars against the rain, made wretched by women, beautiful in their gruff, cigarette-studded despair. He is not beautiful now if he ever was, he knows. He is a ghost, and it is not as pleasant as he had thought. Lyudmila was always so even-tempered, and the land of the dead, when she spoke of it, seemed to him a sensible and well-ordered place, full of all the sorts of things lands and nations ought to have, save that they are populated with people like his sister, with awful, unblinking gazes and unflinching faithfulness. Instead, he is cold and unhappy, and alone. He cannot find Lyudmila no matter how many impossible creatures he confronts. And it rains in the land of the dead, or whatever this place is; it rains and old men kick him out of shabby little shops.

A fish flops in the frothy pale water, its orange tail sweeping up and slapping thickly down again. Oleg scowls at it. He will not find her. She does not want to be found. Milas river is deep and she is a strong swimmer. She ought to be, by now.